@stuartdredge: New Figures Show Per-Stream Payouts from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and More

The figures are based on 2016 streaming data for an independent label with around 150 albums available digitally, which is compared to a similar study in 2014.

According to the analysis, Spotify generated $0.00437 per stream for the label in 2016, down from $0.00521 in 2014. Yet Spotify accounted for 69.6% of the label’s overall streaming revenues: its per-stream rate may have fallen, but its scale still makes it the major earner for this particular catalogue.

(Additional context: if Spotify users have become more engaged in its service over time, listening to more music by more artists, that would be a factor in the falling average per-stream payout. When Spotify relaunched its artists portal in November 2016, it stopped publishing its own figure for average per-stream payout to all rightsholders.)